Second Thoughts: Tech, Open Source, Code-as-Law

The archived forums have some really great stuff in them and I hope the Lindens don't delete it -- but we can't trust them, after all, they closed the five most important, cutting-edge forums which contained the most relevant debate and discussion (albeit rancorous) about the very formation of the world and the metaverse itself. I know I wrote long posts there because I wanted to make sure it all got recorded for posterity for the growing ranks of analysts and future residents to study. I wish someone could make some powerful, automatic system that would download and save all those forums and make them into a searchable database that is housed in some publicly-accessible space away from the Lindens' censorious hands.

blaze Spinnaker's thread, SL must move beyond the Techi Wiki culture is a classic, a greatest hit, that takes further my original concept of the "tekkie-wiki". In it, I give my own definition of what I originally coined as the "tekkie-wiki" and I critique the closed, arrogant nature of the hothouse wickiup that deceitfully disguises its closed nature by ostensibly remaining "open to anyone to come up and put a sticky". And the usual parade of early adapters from Cubey Terra to Teeny Leviathan to Cienna Rand on down all weigh in to prove that a) SL doesn't at all suffer from the problem of being hobbled by a technical elite (!) and b) this technical elite in fact made all sorts of cool stuff like shiny bling and even Tringo so the masses should appreciate them.

To which I add that it's a lot like justifying the billions spent on the space program, when you end up with people even dead and just a lot of pictures of rocks and some Tang lol.

Of course, the space program is justifiable for many reasons of science beyond rocks but just like outer space exploration needed to pay its freight, either through government or private funding, so inner space exploration in virtual worlds, which is going to turn out to cost a lot, too, needs to find where it will pay its freight -- and not only on the backs of prosumers and pay-to-play addicted and the "crowd-serfed" who were "crowd-sourced" into working in Philip Rosedale's giant wiki in the sky.

User-content, and users monetarizing their time on line and generating content is all going to be important to *offset* costs and empower people but it can't *cover* the enormous costs of the making of the Metaverse. People would like to think the Metaverse will sort of make itself, or at least let 2 percent of its users who are skilled programmers make enough of it to get started, and then make a bundle off the rest of us getting licensed, or even free access to use the space. I don't think this is going to happen quite as they imagine.

This tekkie-wiki thread is an amazing catalogue of all the worst, most hobbling, self-referential and self-justifying technical thinking you can see -- backed up, of course, by some of the smug burghers of Second Life who may not necessarily themselves be so technically-minded, but who gain their economic advantages from programming, scripts, design, etc. in one way or another. They completely reject the notion that they run things or have an inside track or are privileged; they completely reject the notion that they are in the way of progress; they completely reject the notion that they are "evolved into a niche" (as Raph put it about games, and which I am enlarging as a concept I believe will go beyond MMORPGs into many other forms of not only worlds, but a lot of network technology).

It would be great of people could read this long, 26-page, 378-entry thread (!), but they're unlikely to, especially given that you have to wade through the usual ration of shit from FIC fanboyz and naysayers against any form of valid criticism of the way this world is being made.

But---it's important to think about it, as yet again, this game with the 11,000 online users and 300,000 logged in during the last 60 days are experiencing even more outages, crashes, down times, patches, and mess-ups.

I was reminded about this thread by thinking of Andrew "Throttle" Linden and looking up his famous contribution about the need to throttle membership if it grows too fast to enable himself and his fellow programmers to "get it right," and -- I might add -- to enable the class of the tekkie-wiktatorship to install itself and its content-creation machine more firmly.

I could add that the SL History Wiki is once again not only showing that history is written by the victors, but showing that history written by just a couple tekkie-wikis can get pretty tendentious by their coverage of the Andrew Linden "throttle" story, in which they leave out a lot of the debate of this very thread on the forums which blaze started and I also moved along -- to which Andrew felt compelled to respond in April 2005 as follows:

"It was always the intention to start SL small and let it grow. SL 1.0 was not launched ready for 1 million residents, and it is still not ready for that many. SL is growing at a very healthy rate. In fact, LL's main challenge is to develop the platform fast enough that SL's architecture can handle the next season's population. At the moment don't see many reasons to speed up the growth rate -- if SL were to "tip" and suddenly become the next big thing such that hoards of people were joining up, then LL would be forced to throttle new accounts until SL's fundamental system was more ready."

Earlier in this response, Andrew furiously denies that the Lindens ever sit around and talk about the tekkie-wiki problem, and maybe they don't.

But of course everybody else does. The tekkie-wiki problem -- only by another name -- is at the heart of the discussion of the future of the Metaverse organized at the Austin Games Conference; it is at the heart of discussions of the demise of a famous game blogger (who I didn't know of because I'm not much of a gamer); it's at the heart of a lot of what Raph Koster writes about his theory of dinosaurs (although he might not concede that). It's in the Zefranks "ugly myspaces" video of course, which is one of the most fun metaversal videos you can watch on the Internet these days -- thanks to SNOOPYB for pointing it out.

The point of all these discussions is that games and worlds are going to be made and controlled by the people living in them, not merely by the game-gods who create their larger architecture, and that is going to have to mean a form of power-sharing that the technorati -- who Foolish Frost rightly calls a "modern Masonic guild" aren't ready for, are going to resist mightily and bloodily, and will ultimately be eroded and overthrown by. It's one of the most important revolution of our times, the overtaking of the Information Age by the Consumer Age, where consumer rights to download, use, reformat, re-make, re-fashion--and yes, copy -- are going to grow by leaps and bounds and completely overturn the old medieval guild-age models of craftsmanship and art.

Raph Koster's dinosaurs aren't going to be just game companies like Blizzard who made World of Warcraft; they will even be enlightened game gods like Raph Koster himself who will remain as icons, but icons of the past, as more and more people learn how to do what he holds as a secret masonic knowledge now -- and do it even easier and better -- although, still unlikely to completely replace these dinosaurs completely, so that some giant pterodactyls will have to be kept around.

If you're going to create games or virtual worlds with technical tools in them to enable people to have the thrill of creation themselves, they have to operate at at least 2 levels -- 1) the "professional" level for professionally-trained or amateur-but-self-trained programs and artists to function -- and 2) not too complicated and frustrating so that a small but steady stream of casual users can at least knock together stuff on a Sunday afternoon, say, if they need a dock on their lakefront house, or more importantly in terms of innovation in the world, that some of them can cross over from casual to amateur to professional.

Of course, making these tools work well enough to keep professionals captured but not making them so clunky and counter-intuitive that normal people can't access them is the heart of the new media maker's challenge. They don't have a lot of incentive to face it, because it will be their undoing. Consumers need to incentivize the dinosaurs to keep becoming more free as much as the dinosaurs need to keep opening up and incentivizing consumer-creators.

In the AGC discussion, the Multiverse guy, Corey Bridges, evidently differs from the more democratic and long-tail advocate Raph Koster by saying that he thinks the future isn't "user-content" but "indies" -- that is, not amateurs but independent professionals, and that might include amateurs who don't have credentials. He believes that the platform he's making for world-construction, "serious teams are going to be enabled -- indie teams...not just consumers and pro-consumers." And he hastens to explain that "amateur doesn't mean incompetent, just means you don't have credentials, lingo, and contacts."

He also lets on that with his world-burner, we'll see "men in tights" but a "different kind of men in tights" with things like Arden, a Shakespearean world that Edward Castronova, the expert on synthetic worlds and their economies, is making.

Raph evidently thinks more and more users will be empowered to make their own stuff; but of course -- will it be good stuff? I think we need to ensure endless horizons to make bad and tasteless stuff -- ugly MySpaces -- to create the space needed for future innovation, simplification, and empowerment.

It's very hard for game gods to let people be free to be mediocre; they can't help sneering, and they can't help being worried how that doesn't help them sell their platform to more people, who want to see jet-skiing in front of fabulous condos, not clumsy lean-tos with a picture of somebody's RL dog on the wall.

One thing I've found in Second Life is that if you introduce people to their own space and tell them they can build anything they want, very few do -- still, a significant number will, enough to keep all three of my newbie communities, each of which holds about 20 people full most of the time. However, what some "build" is merely a prefab -- although in most cases, they want a prefab they can totally take apart and mod. The Archer house by Bill Stirling, for example, is perfect for that -- he's made it cost $1 and made it copyable and moddable, unlike a lot of clutchy content makers, so that newbies can make endless variations of the fences, walls, roof, etc., stacking it up, putting out half or double the house, etc. Rem Koolhaas's housing units fulfill the same function, but at a higher price.

In most cases, these consumer-creators with their suburban souls don't satisfy the liberal, often urban sophisticated (or provincial zealous) tekkie wiki soul, and don't build something like a fractal rotating Moebius strip with some representation of data floating around it -- because they want a house, and a comfortable house where they can really go inside, have good camera angles, feel protected and private (as best you can given that's an illusion in SL with camera zoom and fly-ins), and decorate the internal and external space.

Out of the hundreds of newbies I've subsidized by dollar-a-prim or even lower-cost newbie settlements, only some go on to greater glory as content creators and builders. Still, enough do to raise the question of whether the policy of subsidizing or incentivizing some "merited" portion of the amateur content creation class is justified for game companies.

The other thing that's clear, however, is that aging newbies and too-old oldbies constantly invade this experimental, subsidized space and try to suck it down and rip it off without any sort of return, or outright grief it by junking it up or putting graffiti in the groups or the areas. (On a larger scale, this is what happened to the Lindens' developers' awards, as the camp-chair kings drained it dry.) It's like the problem of inner-city projects, where the sameness and drabness of the physical plant seems to inspire people to piss in the hallways more and break the windows.

If you try to ameliorate the problem by putting out really nice prefabs and walkways and bushes or townhouses all in a row, people often rebel and drive you nuts with their incessant call to modify, change, replace, even erase what you carefully put out. But the minute you go back to putting out empty lots again, it seems a new wave of customers come up and get bewildered over the "too many choices" involved and go looking for the prefabbed experience again.

I think the balancing act required here between world-makers and consumer-creators can be illustrated with the "look" today of the norther atoll continent with the moth names, and the southern down-under continent with the brown-sugar sand and the Korean names -- and even the finishing off of the northwestern stoney shores on the eastern edge of the mainland.

In the atoll continent, the Lindens tried some new content stuff, back when they evidently envisioned getting rid of telehubs, putting in p2p, putting in new map capacity, and then having people explore the expanes of this area without telehubs.

So they didn't put in telehubs, forced people to fly huge distances to "explore" (such social engineering was heartily resented by most people and eventually they put in a few telehubs). They put in quaint cobble-stone roads; wooden walkways; a colourful temple based on a RL temple in Thailand; a great stone wall; even an airplane crash. Some of this was a bit hastily done; at least one virtual architect sneered at the Moth Temple as "like Tinker Toys" -- that's silly, as other architects recognize it is a great work of art and perfect not only as a virtual world historical site, but as a telehub, and now as a visitors' site -- that is, if we can develop it enough to attract visitors and advertise it.

Meanwhile, down under, the Lindens didn't put anything; no roads, no bridges, no builds of any kind, not even infohubs at first, and just some not-for-sale Linden land to break up the endless expanse of beach.

This was LL's answer to Anshe Chung, who bought islands, textured them with white sand, and sold bunches of them for a huge amount of money -- the Lindens felt they should do no worse. The Lindens' essential distaste for "the masses" and their disdain for "white pancake sand" was evident, however. In the northern atoll they doctored the sand with something that was probably intended to be brown/green lichen but came out looking more like blue chemical waste; they did a little better with the brown-sugar stuff in the south but couldn't bring themselves to bleach it white for ideological reasons.

The toxic-spill approach to land development always seems to slip out of the Lindens when they go at something; they can't help but set up areas to be denuded and blighted all in the name of "freedom of creativity--land is your blank canvas"-- like their really dumb idea of backing up two water sims to each other, so that the waterfront of one sim, sold at a huge price on the auction, later because what I call waterback, facing the ugly houses and casinos plunked on the cheap water of the adjacent sim put in and sold for less later (a criminal action, really, to devalue their customers' early products sold for more, with their later products sold for less).

And down under, there's an amazing wasteland of blight -- it really staggers the mind. Spinning signs, goth castles smack up against black-box porno clubs, desperate little Japanese tea gardens dwarfted by giant modernist spinning cube crap -- you have to admire some of the hearty little stores like 1-800-Bettie's 1930s-1950s that have put down roots in a place like Kyung, and the moments of good taste even in stores that do crop up about every 65,000 meters. What a crime, not putting in Lindens roads or bridges or public areas or protected waterways to give at least some people a change of a protected view, but to also break up the expanse of consumer-creator blight. It was a crime committed in the haste to compete with Anshe and make a buck -- these sims sold for way over their opening auction bid of $1000. As for beating Anshe, I don't think they succeeded; she merely cornered the market and put out portals on every single overpriced piece of land taking the land-shopper to her islands, which are protected from the kind of blight the Lindens didn't bother to reduce with even the slimmest of interventions.

And that's always been my beef about them -- they claim to make it "our world, our imagination," yet they intervene constantly, with welcome area building contests, subsidized newbie rentals on 512s, the wilderness sims, the railroad station building conetst, etc. and then decisions like foregoing roads which themselves are a kind of intervention by non-intervention.

But when they are needed to intervene *just a little* by making a sketch, giving just a general idea -- putting down a road, perhaps sparking imagination with a bit of a ruined wall or a windmill on a tiny commons parcel -- they shirk this obligation of world-builders as somehow being "not scalable" or being what residents are supposed to do. As a result, residents are forced into close and angry proxmity with each other with absolutely no rules -- a simple idea like selling sims as "residential" or "entertainment" (by having more CPU to sustain clubs) to keep the black boxes from lagging out the homes everywhere -- seems beyond the disdainful Lindens, who constantly tell us "it can't scale" and it would harm the almight and sacred "freedom to do what the fuck I want on my land".

Ultimately, the Lindens are likely to give up on their mainland experiment, just as on my tinier scale, where I mimic the Lindens in order to understand what they are doing, I'll be forced to give up my subsidized newbie areas. People want user content. They want game-god content. They want user content AND game-god content. They can't make up their minds. They can't be satisfied.

What the Lindens are selling and what Raph Koster might sell is the pride of creation, a pride that anybody from a humble cube-rezzer and texturer out of the library to a sophisticated island developer can experience. They have to keep the worlds open at both ends for both kinds of consumer-creators, and all in between to experience that amazing thrill. Keeping them open doesn't mean criminal laissez-faire attitudes of licentiousness and fuck-you hedonism that elevates the "do what the fuck I want" mentality of a club on a 2048 m2 to paralyze and devalue the purchase of every other person on the sim, most of whom have even larger parcels than that dumb-ass club with its camp-chair-false-traffic avatar weight and strobe lights.

Comments

Oh...you're back.

Posted by: Squeedoo S. | September 14, 2006 at 02:22 PM

i wonder what the work did to you to make you become like this

Posted by: Kyrah Abattoir | September 14, 2006 at 04:27 PM

Another excellent entry. "Desperate little tea houses" - so apt.

coco

Posted by: Cocoanut | September 14, 2006 at 04:56 PM

Great entry, Prokofy. Thanks for the mention. I should clarify what I said at AGC: I think the future is not *just* user-generated content, but also the wider phenomenon of indie-generated content. (So I include users under the umbrella of indies.) What I was (perhaps clumsily) trying to do in the "Future of Virtual Worlds" panel, was get a fuller term than "user-generated content." I feel that doesn't accurately reflect the full range of creators who are going to be enabled in the very near future. I think users, pro-sumers, independent professionals, and various other hyphenates now have, or are very soon going to have incredibly rich and powerful palettes to create their art.

FWIW, all of the Multiverse team members are huge believers in the long tail. (And specifically in how we're trying to enable it for virtual world creation.) I've scarcely shut up about it since Anderson wrote his first piece about it in Wired a couple years back.

Thanks again.

--Corey

Exec Producer, Multiverse

Posted by: Corey Bridges | September 14, 2006 at 08:23 PM

Hi, Corey, thanks for the comment and the clarification, and I see its a range, and a range from user to professional with "an incredibly rich pallette" -- but I do wonder if *your* long tail is a long tail of indies only (professionals in one way or another)or whether it includes even the amateur maker of ugly stuff.

Another point you made in your presentation, which I didn't mention because it went off into what feels like non-world/non-game areas (but apparently we're to think of it as all metaversal) was something like this: why just talk about "user content" (which you noted was even condescending about blogs and podcasts), when in fact you could just call it "content"--period.

Well, except quality does matter, and there's a difference between The New York Times, the Daily Kos, and my blog, so the question is: the Internet can sustain the New York Times, the Daily Kos, and my blog, but will virtual world owners/makers be willing to sustain the world equivalents in that range?

And I do wonder whether the "rich pallette" and easier-to-use or more capacious tools will product art, or produce quality. I'm not sure if a better hammer makes a better carpenter, maybe not, maybe it's misleading. Perhaps people who are at heart content producers but don't have this or that mechanical eye-hand coordination skill might be amped up just that further along the development ladder, but ultimately, if they suck in art, they suck.

I'm not so sure I believe in the long tail. That is, sure, there's a tail with all kinds of interesting stuff happening along it but it might look like the snake that swallowed the mouse in parts, that people just like to have content made for them, and they can't figure out enough how to make it or even consumer a variety of it from others, and they want the more programmed experience of a game like WoW.

While recognizing that professionals, hyphenated indies/prosumers/newly-capacitated amateurs, etc. all have their role to play, I hope to secure a space where the truly rank amateur who isn't ever going to be good is free to make his home his castle.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | September 14, 2006 at 08:51 PM

Who is Prokofy Neva? And Why is he In this Handbasket?

Posted by: Kyrah Abattoir | September 15, 2006 at 08:20 PM

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=Kyrah+Abbatoir&word2=Prokofy+Neva

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Irk A Baby Tar Ho

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | September 15, 2006 at 10:16 PM